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Andrew Carmellini on Pie

By Jeff Gordinier July 1, 2013 2:40 pmJuly 1, 2013 2:40 pm

Photo

Credit Chester Higgins Jr./The New York Times

“Just the word pie, it’s very evocative of an American spirit of cooking,” said Andrew Carmellini, the celebrated chef, who originally hails from Ohio. So evocative, in fact, that one of his restaurants in downtown Manhattan, the Dutch, originally grew out of his impulse to open a spot that would specialize in pies like buttermilk and shoofly, strawberry-rhubarb and salted Key lime. On the occasion of the Pie Issue, Mr. Carmellini, 42, spoke about pie as icon and inspiration.

His early pie influences “The biggest sacrilege in my family was that you bought what my father would call a supermarket pie. My grandmother lived in Miami and had sour orange trees in the yard. She made sour-orange meringue pie. That was just really cool. My mother was from Michigan, so the whole Michigan Bing cherry thing — that was her big thing. If we wanted a mulberry pie, we had to go pick them. Blackberries, too.”

How pie built the Dutch “With the Dutch it was, ‘Let’s open an American restaurant, and let’s serve pie.’ That was probably the first conversation. It’s kind of roots cooking — that’s what I always thought — and it’s centered around pie. But to find a pastry chef who mostly wanted to explore the many layers of pie — not everyone wants to do that, when you’re in the pastry-chef world. Luckily, Kierin Baldwin was working for me already at Locanda. When I talked to her about it, she said: ‘Yes, that’s what I want to do. Let’s make beautiful pies.’ ”

The secrets to successful pie “Don’t try to make a pie too fancy. That’s really the most important thing. And don’t try to make small pies, because small pies don’t work, in my opinion. Because your crust-to-filling ratio is far inferior to a regular 8- or 10-inch pie. Butter crust is the only way to go.”

A slice of Americana “About a year ago, late at night, I was just clicking through TV channels. I saw a cowboy movie, some old Western or something. There were some cowboys, and they ate pie. They took the piece of pie and they put it in a bowl and they poured milk all over it. What could be more American than that?”
This interview has been condensed and edited.

Correction: July 2, 2013An earlier version of this post misspelled the name of the Dutch's pastry chef. Her name is Kierin Baldwin, not Kieran Baldwin.

A version of this article appears in print on 07/03/2013, on page D3 of the NewYork edition with the headline: My Relationship With Pie: Andrew Carmellini On an American Icon.